


in secret, between the shadow and soul

by ghostinghearts



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 05:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostinghearts/pseuds/ghostinghearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Liam finds a poem Zayn's written and gets a line tattooed and there's Lots of Feelings<br/>and sad!Zayn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in secret, between the shadow and soul

**Author's Note:**

> Title and bits of Neruda are from Sonnet XVII. First time writing Ziam, so be nice, please.  
> Includes very slight mentions of Harry/Louis, and tattoos, of course.

The first time it happens, the first time Zayn's words leave a mark on Liam's skin, it's by accident. 

 

It's nearly midnight and they're in a van somewhere in Paris, strung out and tired from what has felt like an infinite number of plane rides. It's silent, a brief calm in the storm that usually involves Louis giving Harry cheeky slaps on the bum and Niall cheering whenever he wins a round of Angry Birds on his phone or Zayn complaining about the noise and the usual rounds of “get off of me you twit!”

It's nothing but the lull of the car underneath the moonlight, and it's just them, Liam and Zayn, and they're still. Not that Liam and Zayn aren't always still, not that they don't always have a quietness about them, but Liam is sort of burrowed into Zayn's neck and he's drifting from the motion of the car, and Zayn's scribbling something in the pages of a book under the artificial yellow-orange hues of streetlamps and it just. Feels different. It's languid and slow, Liam can't keep his eyes open and all he remembers before drifting off completely is the feeling of ink on his arm, cold but soft.

He wakes up when they arrive at the hotel, bleary-eyed and for some reason Zayn doesn't look at him, just pushes out of the van and shoves his hands into his pocket and hurries inside into the welcoming warmth and light of the hotel lobby.

Liam doesn't notice the blue on his arm until he's in the shower. He fingers it and a word runs down his finger, hope, Liam thinks it says, but it disappears down the drain, staining the shower ring a metallic-blue and the rest of his arm becomes a faded blur until it washes out completely.

So Liam doesn't really notice, per say, but he stores it in the back of his mind, tucks it away gently and quietly and it becomes another secret, another detail of Zayn Liam fails to figure out.

(Maybe Liam should have said something, maybe he shouldn't have left all this empty space in the air, unnamed and undefinable in between them, but it's left unsaid and Liam wakes up from a dream that's foggy but all he remembers is hurried want and touch that's too much.)

//

It's a few weeks later and Zayn's more irritable than usual, even shoving Niall away when he offers a cuddle. There's something wrong but Liam can't put his finger on it. There are bags underneath Zayn's eyes—the skin underneath them nearly translucent—and it takes at least a half pack of cigarettes for Zayn's hands to stop shaking. And he leaves them everywhere, some of them burnt down to the edge and some of them still unlit, leaving traces of his anxiety in tar-smoke and the smudged blue and black of bitten pens.

Like clockwork, Zayn runs a shaky hand through his hair before mumbling “Cigarette” and escaping to the balcony. It sounds heavy in Liam's ears, the word, the synonym for tar and smoke and gray, and it's like Zayn is running away from something. Niall frowns and Louis rolls his eyes and Harry sighs, eyes rising up briefly to meet Liam's. Harry looks like he's trying to tell Liam something, only he doesn't know how, and chooses instead to plop heavily on the couch before letting Louis run his hands softly through his hair. There's an unusual tenderness about them in that moment, something thick and potent in the air that even Liam notices. Usually they're all heat and fire, usually they're stars burnt out from sparkling too much from the constant battle that is Harry-and-Louis. It makes Liam achy, and for some reason it reminds him of brown-tinted-gold and the blues and blacks of Zayn.

//

So Liam doesn't call it snooping, really, but he's in Zayn's hotel room looking for his cardigan when he sees the journal on the floor. To be fair, it's open and just laying there, almost offering itself up to be read, and Liam glances over his shoulder before taking a tentative step towards it. He can't help but feel like he's breaking the rules, bending sacred law. It's strange, though, this idea of secrets between them. They know everything about each other, down to the little quirks and nuances that make each other tick.

It's definitely Zayn's handwriting, though, scrawled, slightly loopy. Liam sits on the carpeted floor, thumbing the pages absentmindedly. Liam closes the book. Then opens it again. Closes. Opens. By the seventh time he's actually somehow got a small papercut and Liam wills himself to breathe. He opens it up at a random page and reads.

And it sort of all falls out in his lap, all of it, everything at once, and it's tender but painful and it's bruises and syntax that hits him to the core. It's burnt lungs and twisted insides and wilted flowers and Liam can feel Zayn's fingertips ghosting on the pages and his skin and he reads his name. (Liam reads his name, or maybe he doesn't, maybe he imagines it, doesn't need to, maybe he just knows when he reads careful placed phrases that make him ache.) The burning turns into a fading and something catches in Liam's throat and he has to put the journal down because he feels dizzy with new feeling.

Liam lays on the carpeted floor until the fibers burn into his skin and he closes his eyes and it's like the words are etched into his eyelids, seeping onto his skin and bones.

//

When they finally have time off in LA, Liam drags Harry away from Louis and asks him to go with him. Harry looks surprised at first, but quiet, and doesn't ask any questions. (That was one of the nice things about Harry—no questions—and Liam thinks that maybe he knew before Liam did, before there was barely an inkling of it in his bones. It's strange, this possibility of a Liam-and-Zayn. A Them. A Them-to-Other-People. It's like everything he knew but with more force—somehow with a tender fragility behind it.)

Liam lets Harry hold his hand while he gets it, (Harry forces him, really, looking slightly green and pale the whole time, despite having gotten plenty of tattoos within the past couple of months. "It's different when it's someone else", he insists, shrugging. "It's like seeing a hurt puppy or something." Liam nods but doesn't understand, not really, the grand idea of his innocence.) Harry grips his fingers so tightly they pale. It stings and it hurts—but Liam's had worse—and it's a sort of pain that means something underneath. Has merit.

And a handful of cash and a bandage later, it's done. Liam listens while Harry drones on about disinfectant and keeping tattoos away from lots water for a while, lost in thought. Liam doesn't know how to bring it up, how to show it to Zayn (Like: Hey I'm Sorry I Read Your Poetry And I'm Sorry I Forgot To Keep Your Ink On My Skin Before, But I Love You, And This Is The Best I've Got.)

“Hey, Li, you okay?” Harry's frowning at him, forehead wrinkling in the middle.

“Fine. Great.” Liam tries to smile reassuringly. It's true, though, he's fine, he's more than fine, but everything has a strange permanency to it, now.

“No regrets, yeah?”  
“Yeah.”

And Harry smiles again and nods, going off again about bandages and infection.

//

Liam gets back to the hotel late, fumbling with his key card in the darkened hallway. The dusk of evening is settling, everything a soft and shadowy orange-gold.

When he gets inside, Zayn's curled in on himself on the bed, back facing Liam. Liam sighs because he looks so tiny, so fragile underneath the glow of the hotel lamplight. Liam sits on the side of the bed that's untouched by Zayn. Everything still except for the slow sound of their breathing. Liam shifts to the side a bit and Zayn stirs and wakes.

“Hey,” Zayn says, soft and quiet, placing a hand on Liam's wrist. He looks half-awake, so tired, his hair tussled and eyes half-lidded with fatigue. “Come 'ere.”

Liam obliges, tucking into Zayn's side instinctively. “Missed you,” Liam whispers into Zayn's neck. He's been gone for a while, Liam thinks. He can read the sadness in Zayn, in the curve of his spine, in his hands, in the corner of his eyes. It makes Liam ache to think that he's been the source of it.

 

It's quiet except for the buzz of the city outside them. It should be lonely, Liam thinks, the endless amount of hotel rooms and the strangeness of two countries in one day, but somehow it isn't. They make do, Liam thinks, Niall with his endless energy and enthusiasm and refusal of the idea of sadness, and well, Harry and Louis just do, everything about them in full-speed, no prisoners. And Zayn thinks too much, thinks in cigarettes and sketchpads and books, thinks so much he forgets to eat.

Liam sits up, separating his limbs from Zayn and shifts slightly. “Can I—Can I show you something?,” he says carefully, afraid of breaking the calm, afraid of the after.

“Course, Li,” Zayn sits up, attentive. The lighting is so low in the room that Liam can't see the whole of his eyes. There's uncertainty in them, but trust. (Trust, and Liam files it away somewhere safe.)

“Okay.” And Liam takes his shirt off. Zayn doesn't look at him at first, almost if he's afraid to look or touch or have, (and maybe he doesn't know that he can have this) and it takes a moment. It takes a moment but Zayn's eyes make their way to Liam's side near his ribs. Zayn's face is unreadable in the dim light and Liam feels nervous.

“Li? What's it say, can't see?” And Zayn scoots closer, and he's reading the words and mouthing them quietly to himself. And it takes a moment, a moment where Liam holds his breath and swears he can feel time slow, and Zayn looks up at him in wonder and amazement and sadness and confusion. And.

“I don't understand, where'd you find that, are those my—“ Zayn cuts himself off, shaking his head.

“Yes. Yes. I don't know, I don't know how to explain properly, but. It's. Yes. These are your words, okay? Right? And it's like when you wrote on my skin, before I understood, and—“

“But that's permanent. That's not ink, Li, that's not going to wash off, I.” Zayn runs a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “Do you know what that means, Liam? Do you? They're not just words, Liam do you understand?”

Zayn backs away from him, shrinking into his skin and Liam feels his heart drop. It hits Liam, suddenly, that Zayn's angry, and there's something he's not getting, and that maybe it's wrong, everything is wrong.

“You can't just do that, get my words tattooed on your skin, God, Liam. Can't you see?” Zayn runs his hands through his hair and for a moment he looks crazy, crazy with an unnamed grief, crazy with pure tired and hurt and heartache and Liam would do anything to erase the look off his face.

“I'm in love with you, do you know that? Do you know that that's what it means?” Zayns whispers, and he looks so scared, and Liam thinks that admission of love shouldn't be terror, it shouldn't hurt, it should be a cry of joy.

“I know, I know, I know,” and Liam says it over and over again, and he's reaching out towards Zayn's wrist because he wants to be touching him and he wants an anchor when he says it back, he wants to touch and be touched and for Zayn to feel.

“I know it's overwhelming and I don't know how to explain it, or maybe it should be enough to explain it, because when I read it I just knew, something clicked, and it's like they were already permanent. In here or something,” and Liam points to his chest, his heart, “And God, Zayn, I'm in love with you too.”

And Zayn's face softens and he reaches out to touch Liam again. And he's smiling, soft and tentative and Liam loves him with everything he's got in that specific moment in time, like he's loving with his bones and his blood and cells and core.

//

“What's your favorite poem?” Liam asks Zayn one evening when they're alone.

Liam is tucked into Zayn, tracing his fingers over Zayn's exposed collarbone and Zayn is humming something soft and slow beside him. Zayn's is the type of un-winded and loose that only happens when he's either really tired or really happy, and his hair is tangled and flat on his forehead. Liam has to catch his breath for a second, has to find a way to breathe again because it's a lot of everything he's ever wanted in this fixed space and time that doesn't feel real.

“Don't have one,” Zayn mumbles back at him, his eyes still closed. It's almost like a punch in the stomach, looking at him sometimes. It almost hurts how beautiful Zayn is. He's all dark edges and long eyelashes and delicate limbs. Zayn reminds Liam of the moon sometimes, ethereal with its fluorescent light and tides.

“Okay. Favorite poet, then,” Liam asks, this time with slightly more force behind it.

“e.e. Cummings? Or Neruda, maybe? I don't know.”

Liam hums appreciatively under his breath, and he noses at Zayn's neck, imploring him to continue.

“Okay. Okay, there's this one by Neruda.”

There's a pause, and Liam knows that he doesn't have to say anything, because something shifts. Zayn's somewhere else now, some place that Liam can't quite put his fingers on.

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

Zayn's voice is so quiet, so still, and barely above a whisper, and Liam doesn't know if it's possible to give voice to what he's feeling, so he just squeezes Zayn's fingers, like he's here, like they're two lost boys anchored down by a poem.

Zayn picks up again, this time stronger, more confident. “I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers,” and Zayn is opening his eyes now, willing himself to look at Liam, and he kisses him. It's light and airy and there's no force of lust behind it, just a fragrant sweetness about it, and when they break apart, gasping and slightly out of breath, Zayn whispers “I know no other way that this: where I does not exist, nor you” before reaching down to plant his lips on Liam's. Then they kiss again. And again. So many times that Liam looses count between the words that Zayn whispers in between, he only knows that they make it through a dozen poems, a hundred lines.

//

It's frightening, really, because Zayn is the hum of electricity in Liam's veins, the exhausting burn out at the end of the day. Liam could write sonnets about the curve of his jaw, the fragility of his eyelids, the expanse of muscles at the hitch of a breath. Liam's no poet, the syntax he builds doesn't get to the root of it, but he could write about Zayn's skin for days; the curve of a spine that he knows better than his own and bones keeping a tender boy upright.

He could try, Liam thinks, so he does, penning, constructing haikus inside Zayn's mouth, inside his thighs, underneath his collarbones, until Zayn burns with him and the both of them, moaning deconstructed phrases and intelligible sighs into his skin.

It's frightening how love, their love, becomes palpable and translucent, leaving no surrenders.

//

(And the thing is, they're hardly ever the hurried want of Harry-and-Louis. Everything about them is the carefulness of diving underwater and the lack of sound within it. It's so much of everything: the chain of cigarettes and the falling. They don't happen suddenly, there's no burst of fireworks, no grand gesture, no stars falling into place. Liam thinks that if Harry and Louis are aligned by the stars, then him and Zayn are aligned by the sea. A quiet progression.) 


End file.
